"Well, can we make it, sir?"
The ace inspected the vacuum-gauges, the helicopter tachometers, and shrugged his shoulders.
""_Fais tout, toi-meme, et Dieu t"aidera_,"" he quoted the cynical old French proverb. "If nothing gives way, there is a chance."
"If we settle into the sea, do you think that with our damaged floats we can drive ash.o.r.e without breaking up?"
"I do not, my Captain. There is a heavy sea running, and the surf is bad on the beach. This Rio de Oro coast is cruel. Have you our exact position?"
"Almost exactly on the Tropic of Cancer, half-way between Cape Bojador to north of us, and Cape Blanco, to south."
"Yes, I understand. That brings us to the Tarmanant region of the Sahara. Fate could not have chosen worse for us. But, _c"est la guerre_. All I regret, however, is that in a crippled condition we have to face a war-party of the Beni Harb. Were we intact, and a match for them, how gladly would I welcome battle with that sc.u.m of Islam!
Ah, the _canaille_!"
CHAPTER XXI
SHIPWRECK AND WAR
"You call them dogs, eh?" asked the chief. "And why?"
"What else are such apostate fanatics? People who live by robbery and plunder--people who, if they find no gold in your money-belt, will rip your stomach open to see if you"ve swallowed it! People who boast of being _harami_ (highwaymen), and who respect the _jallah_ (slave-driver)!
"People who practice the barbaric _thar_, or blood-feud! People who torture their victims by cutting off the ends of their fingers before beheading or crucifying them! People who glory in murdering the "idolators of Feringistan," as they call us white men! Let me advise you now, my Captain, when dealing with these people or fighting them, never use your last shot on them. Always keep a mercy-bullet in your gun!"
"A mercy-bullet?"
"For yourself!"
The Master pondered a moment or two, as _Nissr_ drifted on toward the now densely ma.s.sed Arabs on the beach, then he said:
"You seem to know these folk well."
"Only too well!"
The Master"s next words were in the language of the desert:
"_Hadratak tet kal"m Arabi?_" (You speak Arabic?)
"_Na"am et kal"m!_" affirmed the lieutenant, smiling. And in the same tongue he continued, with fluent ease: "Indeed I do, _Effendi_. Yes, yes, I learned it in Algiers and all the way south as far as the headwaters of the Niger.
"Five years I spent among the Arabs, doing air-work, surveying the Sahara, locating oases, mapping what until then were absolutely unknown stretches of territory. I did a bit of bombing, too, in the campaign against Sheik Abd el Rahman, in 1913."
"Yes, so I have heard. You almost lost your life, that time?"
"Only by the thickness of a _semmah_ seed did I preserve it," answered the Frenchman. "My mechanician, Lebon, and I--we fell among them on account of engine trouble, near the oasis of Adrar, not far from here.
We had no machine-gun--nothing but revolvers. We stood them off for seven hours, before they rushed us. They captured us only because our last cartridges were gone."
"You did not save the mercy-bullet that time, eh?"
"I did not, _Effendi._ I did not know them then as I do now. They knocked us both senseless, and then began hacking our machine to pieces with their huge _balas_ (yataghans). They thought our plane was some gigantic bird.
"Superst.i.tion festers in their very bones! The giant bird, they believed, would ruin their date crops; and, besides, they thirsted for the blood of the Franks. As a matter of fact, my Captain, these people do sometimes drink a little of the blood of a slaughtered enemy."
"Impossible!"
"True, I tell you! They destroyed our plane with fire and sword, reviled us as pigs and brothers of pigs, and named poor Lebon "kalb ibn kalb," or "dog and son of a dog." Then they separated into two bands. One band departed toward Wady Tawarik, taking Lebon. They informed me that on the morrow they would crucify him on a cross of palm-wood, head downward."
"And they executed Lebon?"
Leclair shrugged his shoulders.
"I suppose so," he answered with great bitterness. "I have never seen or heard of him since. As for me, they reserved me for some festivities at Makam Jibrail. During the next night, a column of Spanish troops from Rio de Oro rushed their camp, killed sixty or seventy of the brown demons, and rescued me. Since then I have l.u.s.ted revenge on the Beni Harb!"
"No wonder," put in the chief, once more looking at the beach, where now the war-party was plainly visible to the naked eye in some detail.
The waving of their arms could be distinguished; and plainly glittered the blood-crimson sunset light on rifle-barrels, swords, and javelins.
The Master loosened his revolver in its holster. "About twenty minutes from now, at this rate," he added, "some of the Beni Harb will have reason to remember you."
"Yes, and may Jehannum take them all!" exclaimed the Frenchman, pa.s.sionately. His eyes glowered with hate as he peered across the narrowing strip of waves and surf. "Jehannum, where every time their skins are burned off, as the Koran says, new ones will grow to be burned off again! Where "they shall have garments of fire fitted upon them and boiling water poured upon their heads, and they shall be beaten with maces of iron--"
"And their tormentors shall say unto them: "Taste ye the pain of burning!"" the Master concluded the familiar quotation with a smile. "Waste no time in wishing the Beni Harb future pain, my dear Lieutenant. Jehannum may indeed reserve the fruit of the tree Al Zakk.u.m, for these dogs, but our work is to give them a foretaste of it, today. Kismet seems to have willed it that you and the Beni Harb shall meet again. Is it not a fortunate circ.u.mstance, for you?"
"Fortunate, yes," the Frenchman answered, his eyes glowing as they estimated the strength of the war-party, now densely ma.s.sed along the shining sands, "But, thank G.o.d, there are no women in this party! That would mean that one of us would have to kill a woman--for G.o.d help a woman of Feringistan caught by these _jinnee_, these devils of the waste!"
Silence again. Both men studied the Beni Harb. The Frenchman judged, reverting to his native tongue: "Certainly more than three hundred of these "abusers of the salt," my Captain. And we are hardly thirty.
Even if we reach land, we must soon sink to earth. Without food, water, anything--_ce n"est pas gai, hein?_"
"No, it is not gay," the chief answered. "But with machine-guns--"
"Machine-guns cannot fight against the African sun, against famine, thirst, delirium, madness. Well--"blessed be certainty," as the Arabs say."
"You mean death?"
"Yes, I mean death. We always have that in our grasp, at any rate--after having taken full toll of these devils. I should not mind, so much, defeat at the hands of the n.o.bler breed of the Arabian Peninsula. There, in the _Ruba el Khali_[1] itself, I know a chivalric race dwells that any soldier might be proud to fight or to rule over.
But these Shiah heretic swine--ah, see now, they are taking cover already? They will not stand and fight, like men!"
[Footnote 1: _Ruba el Khali_ (The Empty Abodes), a name applied by the Arabs to the Peninsula, especially the vast inner region never penetrated by any white man.]
Scornfully he flung a hand at the Beni Harb. The fringes of the tribe were trickling up the sands, backward, away, toward the line of purple-hazed dunes that lined the coast. More and more of the war-party followed. Gradually all pa.s.sed up the wady, over the dunes and vanished.
"They are going to ambush us, my Captain," said Leclair. ""In rice, strength; in the Beni Harb, manhood!""
Nearer the land, ever sagging down but still afloat--though now at times some of the heavier surges broke in foam over the rail of the lower gallery--the Eagle of the Sky drifted on, on. Hardly a half-mile now lay between air-liner and sh.o.r.e. Suddenly the Master began to speak:
"Listen, Lieutenant! Events are at a crisis, now. I will speak very plainly. You know the Arabs, good and bad. You know Islam, and all that the Mohammedan world is. You know there are more than 230,000,000 people of this faith, scattered from Canton to Sierra Leone, and from Cape Town to Tobolsk, all over Turkey, Africa, and Arabia--an enormous, fanatic, fighting race! Probably, if trained, the finest fighting-men in the world, for they fear neither pain nor" death. They welcome both, if their hearts are enlisted!"